Abstracts, XIV OPTIMA Meeting, Palermo (Italy) , 9-15

XIV OPTIMA Meeting, Palermo (Italy), 9-15 September 2013
Palynology for the Mediterranean vegetation history: human-environment interactions
in a changing climate
SADORI L. 1 ,MARIOTTI LIPPI M. 2 , MERCURI A. M. 3
1 Dipartimento di Biologia Ambientale, Università La Sapienza, Roma. E-mail. laura.sadori@uniroma1.it
2 Dipartimento di Biologia, Università di Firenze.
3 Dipartimento di Scienze della Vita, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia.
The Mediterranean basin has always featured, and still has, extremely rich environmental biodiversity.
This natural richness and variety has been enriched and conditioned by the development of several
cultures. A huge set of biological archives provides evidences of flora and vegetation changes in
the Mediterranean regions along time. These changes have occurred not only during the distant past,
but also in the recent one. Altogether they determined the shape of the present-day plant landscape.
Palynology has been extensively used to reconstruct different scenarios through the geological
times. Besides many expected results, some surprises were found. It is not surprising that a consistent
contingent of subtropical taxa was still present in the Italian Pliocene flora (Bertini & Martinetto 2011,
Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 304: 230-246; Sadori & al. 2010, Quaternary
International, 225: 44–57) and that steppe and grassland formations covered in most occasions the
Mediterranean lands during glacial times (Bertini 2010, Quaternary International, 225: 5-24). On the
contrary, the presence of dense oak forests in central Sicily around 9000 years ago (Sadori & Narcisi
2001, The Holocene, 11: 655-671), the expansions of Abies alba woods along the central Tyrrhenian
coast until mid Holocene (Bellini & al. 2009, The Holocene, 19: 1161-1172), and the persistence of
pine forests in central Spain until the last millennia (Carrión & al. 2010, Review of Palaeobotany and
Palynology, 162: 458–475) could be puzzling.
If we consider the vegetation changes occurred in the last millennia we have to admit they are the
results of interlaced environmental and cultural changes (Mercuri & Sadori 2013, chapter 30, The
Mediterranean Sea: its history and present challenges. Springer, Dordrecht; Sadori et al. 2010, Plant
Biosystems, 144: 940 – 951). Mediterranean habitats have been continuously transformed by climatic
changes occurring at a global scale. In the meantime, the environment has been exploited and the landscape
shaped by different human groups and societies (Mercuri & al. 2011, The Holocene, 21: 189-
206; Kouli 2013, Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, 21: 267-278; Mercuri & al. 2013, Quaternary
International 303: 22-42). Joint actions of increasing dryness, climate oscillations, and human impact
are hard to disentangle, and this becomes particularly true after the mid-Holocene (Roberts & al. 2011,
The Holocene, 21: 3-13; Sadori & al. 2011, The Holocene, 21: 117-129).
Important changes in Mediterranean vegetation seem to have coincided either with marked increases
in social complexity or with enhanced aridity during the Holocene, or with both of them.
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